![]() In the days before automobiles, those who could afford to travel did so by horse-drawn coach. The breed’s strong yet streamlined body made it a natural athlete, and its affinity for horses – shades of those Egyptian chariots its ancestors accompanied – soon led it to be used as a carriage dog. The first stirrings of the modern Dalmatian trace back to the 16 th Century, when well-heeled Englishmen returning from the continent brought some of these attractively polka-dotted dogs with them. Any breed that can work as a messenger during both world wars, as well as star as an eye-catching circus performer, is nothing if not versatile. And just like those itinerant travelers alongside whose brightly colored wagons it trotted, the Dalmatian was a jack of all trades, able to herd, retrieve, guard, and control vermin. Still, it certainly did not originate there. Others point to Jurji Dalmatin, a 16 th-Century poet from Serbia who mentioned the breed in correspondence, or to the cloaks of “dalmaticus” fur worn by monks in a 14 th-Century painting by the Florentine artist Andrea Bonaiuto that also depicted spotted dogs of Dalmatian type.įinally – and probably most unlikely – the name is attributed to the Croatian province of Dalmatia, where the breed surfaced in the mid-1800s, and where it was often associated with the Roma people. Some argue that it’s a time-smoothed version of “Damachien,” which itself a portmanteau of “dama,” the Latin term for fallow deer, and the French word for dog. Ergo (center) puts her Dalmatians through their paces at her kennel in Farmingham, England in 1933.Īdding to the breed’s air of mystery, its very name is a source of umpteen theories. That cross resulted in offspring that hunted deer and worked so well with horses they were naturally inclined to run alongside them – a tantalizing preview of the Dalmatian’s later role as the world’s pre-eminent carriage dog. Some 2,000 years later, Greek frescos depicted both black- and brown-spotted dogs, their dotted coats meticulously painted, chasing a boar.īringing these two ancient sources together, some canine historians point to records of a 400 BC breeding between a Cretan Hound (which survives to this day on the Greek island of Crete) and a Bahakaa Dog, or White Antelope Dog, a likely reference to its color and swiftness. As far back as 3700 BC, Egypt’s King Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid, was said to have owned one. So Where Did Dalmatians Really Come From?ĭistinctively spotted dogs have been documented across cultures and continents – not to mention millennia. (“Might be that they’re really cats,” one researcher quipped to me.)Īll this head-scratching in laboratories confirms what Dalmatian fanciers have known all along: Theirs is an indisputably unique and ancient breed. Though genetically they are grouped among retrievers, Dalmatians don’t line up strongly with any established modern breeds. ![]() As scientists have started poking into the DNA of our dogs, mapping what genes various breeds share, they have been able to piece together how they are related.īut when it comes to Dalmatians, all that scientific evidence comes to a screeching halt.
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